There has, through my years on the SDMB, once in a while been a rule pointed at one specific poster. The Handy rule prohibited that poster from offering medical advice; the Reeder rule limited that poster from every day starting threads attacking Bush; and others.
It is now, in my opinion, time for the Valteron rule: shut the fuck up.
In his latest 102 posts (since 12/10/2010) he has posted
Personally, I think people should be allowed to post as many threads as they like, on whatever topics they like. People can always choose to ignore them, and ‘offenders’ would probably stop posting so much if their threads stopped generating responses. I only ask that people put some effort into their OP’s. There are a couple of posters I can think of who I’d like to ban from starting GD OP’s with a single sentence intro and an Op-Ed link, even though they don’t actually start threads that often.
The SDMB has never been ruled by the invisible hand of the market. The admins and mods work very hard at maintaining the content and tone of the board. One-trick ponies have never been encouraged here.
Well, actually, the gist of that person’s complaint was that I had no business posting to GD threads when (up to that point) I’d only ever started one.
And all of a sudden there’s a bunch of them, venemous bigotry-cooties. WTF? And several of them have very similar grammar, syntax, word usage. I’d say “style”, but I won’t. Its as if they all studied Invective 101 at the same community college in Bumfuck, Nebraska.
Well, no. From what I’ve seen elsewhere it’s more likely you’d end up with a few people posting large numbers of threads and driving everyone else off the front page.
Given that he pretty much limits his anti-Islam hysteria to his own threads I don’t have much of a problem with it. If he were hijacking every thread even tangentially related to Islam with his breathless worries about how the rest of us aren’t scared enough of Arabs, then I’d get behind a Valteron rule. As it is, all it takes to avoid him is to not open threads he starts.
If I recall correctly Handy was dispensing particularly crappy, possibly dangerous advice and kept doing so when told to ease up. Reeder was clogging the board with a bazillion unnecessary new threads on his favorite topic, causing other threads to be “prematurely” bumped off the front page. Evil Captor I think it was, was injecting his pet passion into barely related threads to the point where it was essentially constantly hijacking to an off-putting extent.
Valteronis rather monomaniacal and I personally find his polemics, gotchas and overall debating pattern pretty tiresome. But he isn’t harming anyone, blitzing the board with new threads or hijacking that excessively far as I can tell. As tedious as his propagandizing is, I’d probably give him a pass at this point.
Though I reserve the right to change my mind if I’m feeling more irritable tomorrow ;).
For what it’s worth, he’s done some good: thanks to his threads, I’ve read enlightening posts by Ibn Warraq and Tamerlane (quoting collounsbury) regarding the possibility that MEMRI is rather less objective than it purports to me.
My degree is in foreign policy, with a focus on Arab affairs, and I had never known about that before. So thanks, Valteron.